WHERE ARE WE GOING?" DIANA ASKED, LAUGHING AS HE led her toward the elevators. It felt better and better to laugh. Tomorrow, reality would crush her again like a boulder, but for tonight, Cole and the wine and the necklace were all combining to provide an unexpected respite from the misery, and she was determined to enjoy it. "How about Lake Tahoe?" Cole suggested as he pressed the elevator button. "We could get married, go for a swim, and be back here in time for brunch tomorrow."

Diana assumed he was practicing his proposal on her again, and she took pains to hide her amusement at his blunt haste and his unromantic attitude. "Tahoe's a little too far," she said breezily. "Besides I'm not dressed for it."

She glanced down ruefully at her gown, and Cole's eyes followed her gaze, drifting over the creamy gentle swell of her breasts above the bodice of her gown, then dipping to her narrow waist. "In that case, there's only one other place that offers the sort of atmosphere and privacy required for what I have in mind."

"Where is that?"

"My suite," he said as he ushered her into the crowded elevator and slid a key into the slot beside the top button marked Penthouse.

Diana fired him a glance of real concern, but there were people from the ball in the elevator and she couldn't possibly argue in front of them. When the last elderly couple got off on the floor beneath his, however, she turned to him and shook her head. "I really shouldn't disappear from the ball like this, particularly not with you, not with—"

"Why not with me, in particular?" he asked coolly.

The elevator stopped and the doors opened into the penthouse's black marble foyer. Instead of getting out, Cole braced his hand against the door to prevent it from closing. A little dizzy from the champagne and the elevator's swift ascent, Diana felt an inappropriate urge to giggle, not cower, at his forbidding expression. "You've been so busy helping me save my reputation that I'm not sure you've realized the jeopardy you've put your own in. What I meant before was that I shouldn't have disappeared with you without first telling my family why you really bought this necklace. Furthermore, if any of those pictures of us make the news, and people know you're about to be married, you're going to look like a man without integrity."

Cole felt a sudden urge to laugh. "You are worried about my reputation?"

"Of course I am," Diana said primly, stepping out of the elevator and into the private vestibule of his suite.

"Now, that," Cole said with a grin, "is a first. In fact," he added, as they entered the suite's living room and he switched on the tiny lights concealed in the cove of the ceiling, "I have a feeling tonight is going to be a night of several firsts."

He glanced over his shoulder at Diana, who had stopped near the coffee table in the middle of the living room. She was watching him, her head tipped to one side, her expression more puzzled than wary. Puzzled was good, Cole decided. Wary was bad. He walked over to the bar and removed a bottle of champagne from the refrigerator. Alcohol in the bloodstream of a woman who was already delightfully rosy from gratitude and relief would help keep her wariness under control.

" 'Firsts'?" she repeated. "What is there that you haven't done until tonight?"

"For starters," he said lightly, "I've never stood outside on the balcony of this suite with a woman." He popped the cork on the champagne and plunged the bottle into the ice bucket on the bar. "Shall we make that another first?"

Diana watched him unbutton his tuxedo jacket and loosen his bow tie; then he tucked the ice bucket into the crook of his elbow and, with a champagne flute in each hand, paused to flip a wall switch with his elbow, which made the heavy draperies in front of the balcony doors glide apart. Superimposed over that image was a memory of him in faded jeans and shirt, currying a horse with one hand and reaching for a bridle with the other while he carried on a conversation with her about her schoolwork. Even then, he'd always seemed to be doing several things at once. He stepped aside, waiting for her to precede him onto the balcony, then handed her the drink he'd poured.

He'd noticed her smile as he opened the balcony doors. "Have I done something amusing?"

Diana shook her head. "I was just thinking that, even in the old days, you always seemed to be able to do several things at the same time and completely effortlessly. I always admired that."

The compliment was so surprising to Cole, and so pleasing, that he couldn't think of a reply, and so he watched in silence as she stepped past him onto the tiny patio.

Walking over to the railing, Diana gazed out at the glittering carpet of Houston lights far below while soft music drifted from the stereo in the living room and her mind drifted inexorably to Dan.

Cole joined her, but angled his body so that he was facing her, with his elbow propped on the railing. "I hope you're thinking of Penworth, and not me, with that woebegone expression on your face."

Chafed at having been described as woebegone, Diana proudly lifted her chin. "We haven't spent much time together in the last year, and I've practically forgotten him already."

Instead of replying, Cole merely raised his brows and regarded her in skeptical silence, managing to convey not only his disbelief but also his disappointment in her obvious unwillingness to confide in him. After the way he'd come to her rescue tonight, Diana knew he deserved more than a brush-off for an answer. "That was a lie," she conceded with a shaky sigh. "The truth is that I've accepted what happened as being final, but I feel… furious. I feel furious and humiliated."

"Of course you do," Cole said with amused sympathy. "After all, you've just been dumped by the scum of the earth."

Diana's jaw dropped. She stared at him in angry shock. And then she burst out laughing.

Cole's answering chuckle was rich and deep as he slid his arm around her, pulling her close to his side. The soft, fine fabric of his jacket brushed her bare skin as he curved his arm around her shoulders, his fingers sliding warmly up and down her arm. Even though she was merely a stand-in for his soon-to-be fiancée, it was still nice to know that someone—someone tall and handsome and very special— seemed to find her appealing enough to want to spend time with her tonight. Appealing and worthwhile. Not like Dan, who'd— She lifted the glass to her mouth and took a long swallow to chase away the thoughts of Dan.

She remembered that Cole wanted to perfect his proposal technique, and that reminded Diana that she was still wearing the necklace. "I'd better take this off before I forget and leave with it," she said, reaching behind her neck for the clasp.

"Leave the necklace alone," he instructed. "I bought it for you."

Her hands stilled at his tone. "No, you bought it for the woman you intend to marry—"

"That's what I just said."

Diana gave her head a shake to clear it. Turning so that she could see his face, she shoved her hair back off her forehead and ruefully admitted, "I've had much more to drink tonight than I normally would have, and I seem to be having trouble following the thread of our conversation. It's as if you're talking in riddles."

"In that case, I'll make it clearer. I want you to marry me, Diana. Tonight."

She grabbed the high railing and gave a shriek of laughter. "Cole Harrison, are you drunk?"

"Certainly not."

She studied him in adorable confusion. "Then… am I drunk?"

"No, but I wish you were."

Finally, she loosened her grip and turned to him with a wobbly smile. "You can't really be serious."

"I am very serious."

"I don't want to s-seem ungrateful or critical," she said in a laughing voice, "but I f-feel I ought to warn you that you're now carrying gallantry too far."

"Gallantry has nothing to do with it."

With unemotional objectivity, Cole observed Diana's struggle to regain control over her hilarity. She was so damned lovely, he thought. The newspaper picture of her had probably come from a magazine press kit, and it hadn't done her justice. It had been a moderately glamorous business photo of a smiling, confident woman, but the real-life Diana was far more arresting. The photo hadn't even hinted at the entrancing warmth of her sudden smile, or the red highlights in her glossy hair, or the jeweled sparkle of her thick-lashed green eyes. As far as he could recall, the tiny cleft in the center of her chin had been completely missing.

She could hardly keep her face straight as she said, "Either you are carrying pity for me to an unbelievable extreme, Mr. Harrison, or else you're not playing with a full deck."

"I am neither dim-witted nor crazy," he stated, "and pity has nothing to do with my reasons for wanting this marriage."

Diana searched his shadowy face for some indication that he was joking, but his expression was completely unemotional. "Am I honestly supposed to take you—I mean, this proposal—seriously?"

"I assure you, I'm completely serious."

"Then, do you mind if I ask you a few questions?"

He held out his arms in a gesture of complete cooperation. "Ask me anything you like."

She tipped her head to the side, her face a mirror of confusion and disbelief overlaid with amusement. "Do you happen to be under the influence of any mind-altering drugs?"

"Absolutely not."

"Am I supposed to believe that—um—you fell in love with me when I was a teenager, and you've—ah—carried a torch all this time, and that's why you want to marry me now?"

"That scenario is as ludicrous as the one before it."

"I see." She was absurdly disappointed that he hadn't had even a tiny crush on her when she had been insane about him.

"Would you rather I'd lied about having a crush on you?"

"No. I'd rather you tell me your reason for wanting to marry me," she said flatly.

"There are two reasons: I need a wife, and you need a husband."

"And that," Diana speculated dryly, "makes us perfect for each other?"

Cole looked down at her glowing eyes and smiling mouth and had an impulse to bend his head and slowly kiss the smile from her lips. "I think it does."

"I don't know why you need to get married," Diana said tightly, "but believe me, marriage is the last thingI need."

"You're wrong. Marriage is exactly what you need. You've been publicly jilted in the world press by a jerk, and according to what I read in the Enquirer, your magazine has been under a competitor-driven media attack for nearly a year over your personal state of 'unwedded bliss.' Now that's going to escalate. What did the headline in the Enquirer say…?" He paused, then quoted, " 'Trouble in Paradise—Diana Foster Is Jilted by Fiancé.' " Shaking his head, he said bluntly, "That's bad press, Diana. Very bad. And extremely damaging for business. By marrying me, you could save your pride and also save your company from the negative effects of those headlines."

She gazed up at him as if she'd just suffered a mortal blow from the last person she expected to hurt her. "How pathetic and desperate I must seem to you if you could even suggest such a thing and believe I'd go along with it."

She shoved away from the railing and started to turn toward the doors into his suite, but Cole caught her arm in a gentle but unbreakable grip. "I'm the desperate one, Diana," he said flatly.

Diana stared at him dubiously. "Just exactly what makes you so 'desperate' for a wife that any woman will do?"

Instinct and experience told Cole that a little tender persuasion could vastly further his cause, and he was prepared to resort to that, but only if logic and complete honesty weren't enough to persuade her. In the first place, she was vulnerable right now, and he didn't want to do or say anything that might make her ultimately regard him as a possible substitute for the love, and lover, she'd lost. Second, he had no intention of complicating their marriage with any messy emotional or physical intimacy.

And so Cole ignored the instinct to reach up and brush back a wayward lock of shiny dark hair from her soft cheek, and he squelched the temptation to tell her that she was a long way from being just "any" woman to him or that she was as close to his ideal of femininity as any female could be.

He was not, however, morally opposed to diluting her resistance with as much alcohol as he could pour down her. "Finish your champagne, and then I'll explain."

Diana almost started to argue but decided to compromise and took a sip, instead.

"My problem," he explained calmly, "is an old man named Calvin Downing, who is my mother's uncle. When I wanted to leave the ranch and go to college, it was Calvin who tried to convince my father I wasn't thumbing my nose at him and everything he represented. When my father couldn't be persuaded to see things that way, it was Cal who loaned me the money for tuition. Just before my senior year of college, a drilling company ran a test well on Cal's ranch and it came in. It wasn't a gusher, but it made him about twenty-six thousand dollars a month. And when I graduated and went to Cal with a wild scheme for making money that no banker would agree to finance for me, it was Cal who handed over all his savings to help me get started. From the time I was a kid, Cal believed in me. When I started dreaming of making it really big and getting rich—it was Cal who listened to my dreams and believed in them."

Fascinated by his candor and unable to see how such a kind and caring old man could now be the source of Cole's unnamed "problem," Diana sipped her champagne waiting for him to continue, but he seemed content to watch her instead. "Go on," she urged. "So far he sounds like the last man in the world to cause a 'problem' for you."

"He thinks he's solving a problem, not creating one."

"I don't understand. Even if I hadn't had so much wine and champagne tonight, I don't think I'd understand."

"You don't understand because I haven't told you that part, which is this: After I graduated, my uncle gave me all his savings from the well on his land, and then he borrowed another two hundred thousand dollars against it, so that I could start my own company. Naturally, I insisted on signing a legal note for the money and on making him a full partner in the business."

To the best of her recollection, the article in Time magazine about Cole Harrison's spectacular business successes placed his net worth at over five billion dollars. "I assume you repaid the loan?" she prompted.

He nodded. "I repaid it—along with interest calculated at the rate in effect at the time, as agreed in the note." A wry smile softened his granite features. "Among my uncle's eccentricities is a streak of stinginess a mile wide, which made his willingness to hand over all his money to finance my business plan even more meaningful. To illustrate my point, despite Cal's wealth, he still clips coupons from the newspaper, he still fights with all the utility companies about his bills, and he still buys his clothes at Montgomery Ward. He is so bad that if his phone service goes out for a few hours, which happens several times a year, Cal deducts one day's charges from his bill."

"I didn't know you could do that," Diana said, impressed.

"You can," Cole said dryly. "But they'll turn your phone off until you pay up."

Diana smiled at the colorful description he'd provided of a stubborn, elderly man with a big heart and a tight fist. "I still don't understand how your problem is connected with him."

"The connection is that Cal was a full partner in my original business, and I—who owe my current success to his past moral and financial support—could never bring myself to hurt or offend him by asking him to sign papers dissolving the partnership, not even after I repaid his loan with full interest. Besides, I would have trusted him with my life, and so it never occurred to me that he would balk at turning over his stock when I asked him to do it, let alone consider signing it over to someone else."

Diana was astute enough as a businesswoman to immediately grasp the devastating impact of such an action, but she couldn't quite believe that the man Cole had described would be capable of such treachery. "Have you formally asked him to sign over his shares to you?"

"I have."

"And?"

A grim smile twisted Cole's lips. "And he's perfectly willing to do that, except for one small problem that he feels I'm obliged to solve for him before he can justify giving my company's stock back to me."

He paused and Diana, who was helplessly enthralled, said, "What problem?"

"Immortality."

She gaped at him, caught between laughter and confusion. "Immortality?"

"Exactly. It seems that in the last six or seven years, about the time he turned seventy and his health began to fail badly, Uncle Calvin acquired a strong desire to immortalize himself by leaving behind a brood of descendants. The problem is that besides me, he has only one other blood relative, my cousin. Travis is married to a woman named Elaine and they are both very nice but far from brilliant, and they have two children who are neither nice nor brilliant, and Cal can't stand either one of them. Because of that, Cal now wants to see me married so that I can produce clever babies to carry on the family line."

Still unable to believe she understood what he was trying to tell her, Diana said, "And if you don't do that, then what?"

"Then he will leave his share of my corporation to Elaine and Travis's children, Donna Jean and Ted, who are both in college." He paused to take a swallow of his drink as if he wanted to wash away the bad taste of the words. "In that event, Elaine and Travis would become my business partners with enough shares between them to control the company on behalf of their children until Donna Jean and Ted come of age. Travis already works for me, as the head of Unified's research and development division. He's loyal and he does his best, but he doesn't have the brains or imagination to run Unified, even if I were willing to hand it over to him, which I assuredly am not! His kids lack his loyalty and their mother's common sense and kindness. In fact, they're greedy, egotistical schemers who are already planning how to spend my money when they get their hands on it."

Diana bit back a helpless grin at his plight: Cole Harrison, the invincible wheeler-dealer, the lion of Wall Street, was being held over the proverbial barrel by a frail, elderly uncle—an uncle who was probably getting senile. "Poor Cal," she said on a smothered laugh. "What a dilemma. One great-nephew has no business acumen, but he has a wife and children. The other great-nephew is a brilliant entrepreneur, without a wifeor children—"

"And without the slightest desire to ever have either," Cole added, summarizing his own attitude. Satisfied that she'd grasped the full situation, he lifted his glass in a sardonic toast to her insight.

His unequivocal wish to remain not only single but childless was obscured for the moment by Diana's helpless amusement at his disgruntled tone. "You do seem to be in a remarkable fix," she said with a wayward smile.

"Which, I gather you find entertaining?"

"Well, you have to admit it is just a little… er… gothic," Diana managed unsteadily.

"At the very least," he agreed grimly.

"Although," she continued with an irrepressible grin, "in gothic romances, it's the heroine who gets coerced into a marriage she doesn't want. I've never heard of a hero who got himself into such a position."

"If your intention is to cheer me up, you're not succeeding," he said bitterly.

In fact, he looked so chagrined by her description of his "unhero-like" predicament that Diana had to look away to hide her laughter. She was so amused that it took several moments before she realized how presumptuous and offensive his proposed solution actually was. "And so," she concluded, trying to sound as calm and detached as he had earlier, "when you saw me tonight, you remembered I'd been jilted, and decided I'd be eager to marry you and help solve your problem—particularly if you bought me a necklace to help me save face."

"I'm not that selfish—or that vain, Diana. I know damned well you'd throw my proposition in my face, except for one thing."

"And that is?"

"By marrying you, I'd be offering myself as a solution to your problems."

"I see," Diana said, though she didn't see at all. "Do you mind explaining how?"

"Simple logic. Even though you've been publicly jilted, you can save your pride if you marry me immediately. Tomorrow, the newspapers will be filled with pictures of us kissing on the balcony tonight and the story of my buying you this necklace. If our marriage is announced the next day, people are going to assume that we've had something going all along and that you probably did the jilting, not Penworth."

Diana shrugged to hide the sharp stab of anger and hurt she felt at his callous summation of her own predicament. "I don't have that much pride to save, not if it requires anything as outrageous and rash as what you're suggesting."

"No, but you do have a business to save. The shield of being engaged for the last two years was already wearing thin. Now that that is gone," Cole finished, "your competitors will double their attacks and the media will collaborate in publicizing all the furor and hype for their own benefit."

Anguish and anger turned her green eyes stormy an instant before her long lashes swept down, concealing her emotions from Cole's view—but not in time to prevent him from noting that her reaction to the mention of Penworth's defection wasn't nearly as violent as her reaction to this very viable threat to her company.

Despite her delicate features and fragile, feminine beauty, Diana Foster was apparently a woman who put business first. If nothing else, Cole decided as he watched the breeze ruffle her dark auburn hair, they certainly had that in common.

While he gave Diana time to consider what he'd said, he tried to put together what little he knew about the business that meant so much to her, but there wasn't much. Based on the bits and pieces he'd read or seen on the news this week, all he knew was that the company was founded by the Foster family.

The business had apparently begun as a Houston catering service for the very rich—one that specialized in "natural" foods presented in lavish ways, but using only handmade or homegrown ornamentation. Somewhere along the way, that practice had been dubbed the Foster Ideal, and it had ultimately resulted in a magazine called Foster's Beautiful Living. He'd seen a copy at the airport magazine stand earlier that week, shortly after he'd seen Diana on CNN, and he'd leafed through it. Amid all the glossy photographs of brightly painted furniture, stenciled walls, and tables covered with hand-decorated linens and laden with gorgeous food and stunning homemade centerpieces, the philosophy of the magazine—and the basis for the Foster Ideal—seemed to be that by returning to basics, a woman could and would achieve personal satisfaction, a sense of vast accomplishment, and domestic tranquillity. Beyond that, all he noticed was that the photography had been superb, and that Corey Foster Addison was responsible for it.

That hadn't surprised him, since his every recollection of Corey as a young girl included a camera. He had, however, felt a certain amused irony over the fact that the founder and publisher of that homey, back-to-basics magazine was, in reality, a pampered Houston debutante—one who had once admitted to him, while seated on a bale of hay and grimacing at a smudge on her hand, that she'd never been a tomboy because she didn't like getting dirty.

He glanced sideways at her moonlit profile, and he marveled at the stupidity that had prompted Penworth to prefer an eighteen-year-old Italian model over Diana Foster. Even when she was a teenager, Diana had sparkled and glowed with wit, intelligence, and gentleness. As a woman, her vivid coloring, lovely figure, and innate poise made her stand out like a queen among peasants.

Cole had been with enough models to know that they were boringly obsessive about every molecule of their skin and hair, and that the bodies that looked so beautiful in designer clothes and magazine centerfolds felt like skin stretched over a skeleton in a man's bed.

Penworth was a fool, and he had blown his chance.

Cole Harrison was not a fool, and he was not going to blow his.